A life spent overseas to help people
His dream was to become “a scientist, an inventor or an explorer.” John McWilliam, 57 years old, is a British scientist born in Singapore who married his Canadian wife in Thailand, fell in love with Ghana and is now the head of a little cider mill in Normandy.
He came to France for the first time in 1973 to work as a lumberjack near Alençon. “I wanted to do something manual and physical” he explains. After that, from 1975 to 2002, he worked overseas for the British or the German government. At the beginning, with a scholarship given by the British government, he worked as a scientist specialized on acid soils for three years. “The first time I worked in Thailand was in an area with very acidic soils. They had to control it extremely carefully using water control measures.”
But he wanted to act more. He decided to work for the Commonwealth Development Corporation: “ A very little known but extremely powerful organization which deals with development, energy, agriculture…” For him, it had been the beginning of another life and the end of research “much more limiting.” He says: “Research can give an answer to a lot of questions but without the political will and power to put this in operation, nothing will happen.”
John Mc William worked in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Papua and New Guinea, Ghana and Sierra Leone to help the local inhabitants develop their own small plantations and to be able to grow and develop their own cocoa crops. In Ghana, he spent seven years in the Volta region in forestry reserves to try to stop illegal timber cutting. He also tried to stabilize the fertility of the soils. “The main emphasize for me has been to help people to be able to make money” he said with a broad smile. But from Ghana, news from his friends doesn’t sound very good: “I don’t say it is all lost, people have learned things, but the stability of the system is under threat.”
Supplying drinking water to a quarter of a million people
Among all his works, there is one of whose importance he is convinced. It was in Sierra Leone along the border with Liberia when he tried to take care of all people displaced by the war. “I really did something in Sierra Leone, no question. We had housing, medicine… I was in charge of all of them. It was quite a responsibility but it means that you could really plan things and get things done.” He and his team supplied drinking water to a quarter of a million people. They put up over a thousand different buildings. “It was a very big project. It really did have a very considerable impact.” For him, the completion of projects still depends on skills, the amount of money involved and power.
In Thailand, he started the development of nine thousand plantations. He knew he had a job for life. But in 1987 he gave up his job and decided that he would make a very small plantation for himself somewhere.
Happy memories from Normandy came back. Interested in fruit, he planted apple trees to make cider, “a very underestimated and undervalued crop” around a farm lost in the countryside, near Carrouges. Realistic, he asserts: “The amount of money put into Carrouges is probably equivalent to that made in all the Sierra Leone. So, I think we have to put things in perspective. When I think about my projects, I think it was important but it’s peanuts.”
Anyway, John Mc William has sown his expertise and the crops he has got are invaluable. “I’ve been in places just by myself having to talk to people without speaking a word of their language and try to manage the whole system as well. You have to like it. It’s not just a job it’s your life.”
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